and then I stopped, because it was not a horror standing there between the studs. It was a woman. A painted one. A life-size portrait of a woman in a blue dress, wrapped careful in an old bedsheet, sealed into that wall by somebody who could not bear to keep her and could not bear to let her go.
I got the wet sheet off and stood her in the light. She was beautiful, painted with real love, an amateurs hand but an honest one, every line of her face set down by somebody who had memorized it. On the bottom of the frame, in paint, two names and a date, and the word Beloved.
The older couple we bought the house from eleven years back. I remembered them only a little, a quiet old man and his son handling the sale, the wife not there. I made some calls around Gulfport and I found the son, and I told him I had found a painting in the wall of a woman in a blue dress, and the phone went silent so long I thought the call had dropped.
It was his mother. His father had painted it, the one artistic thing the man ever did in his life, painted his wife over a whole winter the year they were young. She passed the year before they sold us the house. And his father, drowning in it, could not hang her on the wall to look at every single day, and could not put her out with the trash, and could not carry her to the new small place near the kids where there was no room and too much grief. So he did the only thing his broken heart could think of. He wrapped her up gentle and sealed her into the wall of the house where they had been happy, so she could stay in her home even when he could not.
The old man was still living, just barely, in a care home. His son took me to him. I carried the painting in myself and stood her up at the foot of his bed, and that ancient man looked at his wifes face for the first time in eleven years and he lifted one shaking hand toward her.
There she is. There is my girl. I had to leave you in the wall, my love. I am so sorry I had to leave you in the wall.
His son hung the painting where his father could see it from the bed. The old man passed a few weeks later, his wife in the blue dress watching over him the whole time, the way he had painted her to.
A hurricane tore open my garage wall and I thought it had ruined me. What it really did was let a grieving man see his wifes face one last time before he went to join her. I have fixed a lot of water damage in my life. That is the only wall I was ever glad to lose.